Beyond the victim-coercion narrative in the South China Sea

Much contemporary discussion of the South China Sea is organized around a simple structure. A smaller coastal state invokes legal principles and rules-based language in the context of tensions with a larger power, while external actors restate support for international law, freedom of navigation and regional stability.

This structure is easy to communicate and easy to understand. It gives distant audiences a familiar moral vocabulary through which to process maritime incidents that they do not follow closely. But it also compresses a highly layered set of disputes into a stylized account of coercion and resistance that the facts of particular incidents do not always support.

That compression matters because the South China Sea is not a single dispute. It is a complex set of overlapping issues involving sovereignty claims, maritime entitlements, fisheries, coast guard operations, alliance commitments, domestic political signaling and strategic competition. Legal questions are central, but they do not exhaust the subject. Operational encounters at sea rarely derive from law alone; they are shaped by geography, tactics, perceptions of resolve and the political incentives of multiple actors. When these complexities are folded into a single narrative template, the result may be rhetorically effective but analytically incomplete.

The Philippines has become increasingly adept at navigating this informational and diplomatic environment. In recent years, Manila has used legal argument, media access and public diplomacy with increasing sophistication. Its “transparency initiative” is a notable example. By documenting and publicizing maritime encounters in near real time, the Philippines does more than provide information; it also helps shape the sequence through which outside observers encounter and assess events. The first widely circulated description of an incident often becomes the framework within which later details are assessed.

That gives communication strategy a substantive role in the management of disputes.

This point should not be overstated. States have always tried to present facts in ways favorable to their interests. Nor is the Philippines unique in doing so. But the current South China Sea environment shows how public communication can become deeply integrated with law and diplomacy. Legal vocabulary may serve not only to clarify claims, but also to assign political meaning to events at an early stage. Terms such as coercion, rules, status quo and lawful rights are not merely descriptive, they can influence international reactions before the factual record of a specific encounter has been fully evaluated.

International law is central to this discussion, but it should be approached with precision rather than be used as a marker of political virtue. The 2016 arbitral award is frequently invoked by the Philippines and by many outside observers as a reference point in South China Sea debates. Yet its legal reasoning, jurisdictional reach and implications for the broader dispute remain contested among scholars, states and practitioners of the law of the sea. Treating the award as politically consequential does not require treating it as legally or analytically exhaustive. Nor can any single legal instrument settle every sovereignty issue, every operational disagreement or every question concerning maritime conduct.

Law is most useful when it disciplines argument, clarifies the scope of disagreement and structures expectations for restraint. It becomes less useful when it is invoked primarily as shorthand for moral authorization or as a substitute for detailed analysis of specific encounters at sea.

A further problem in outside commentary is the tendency to equate asymmetry with responsibility. Because China is larger and more powerful, many observers assume in advance that it must also be the principal source of escalation.

Power asymmetry matters, but it should guide scrutiny rather than predetermine conclusions. China’s conduct has certainly contributed to regional suspicion and deserves scrutiny. But analytical rigor requires more than the repetition of structural assumptions. Smaller states are not merely passive recipients of pressure; they are also strategic actors. They build partnerships, shape the framing of incidents, invoke legal discourse and decide how far local encounters should be internationalized. To acknowledge this is not to deny power asymmetry; it is to recognize agency on all sides.

In this sense, the Philippines should be understood not only as a claimant under pressure, but also as an actor shaping how the South China Sea is interpreted internationally. Its decisions about how incidents are recorded, publicized, sequenced, and linked to wider questions of law and order influence how the dispute is debated far beyond the region. This is especially important when outside audiences have limited familiarity with the details of specific episodes. Under such conditions, the struggle to define what an incident means can become almost as consequential as the incident itself.

The South China Sea is unlikely to become less contested in the near future. That is precisely why the quality of international analysis matters. If each encounter is folded too quickly into a familiar script of victimhood and coercion, both legal analysis and diplomacy are likely to suffer. Law will lose authority when it is treated chiefly as a political idiom. Diplomacy will become more difficult when external validation carries greater value than patient management of risk.

A more credible approach would neither dismiss Philippine concerns nor overlook Chinese interests. It would insist instead on factual discipline, legal precision and greater caution about the narratives through which the dispute is explained to the wider world. The South China Sea does not need fewer principles; it needs principles applied with greater attention to facts, context and consequences.

This article was originally published in China Daily on June 30, 2026.